


Your Protector's Coming Home

by Elanor



Category: War Horse (2011)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-19
Updated: 2012-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 10:34:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elanor/pseuds/Elanor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie dies; Jim lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Protector's Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moosewingz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moosewingz/gifts).



Jamie led them into this disaster, but Jim can't blame him, has never blamed him, will never be able to blame him. Not when Jamie nearly broke his arm tackling him off a horse for a joke, not when he used up all the hot water in the mornings, not when he's still drowsy on sleep and calls him Mummy as he absentmindedly kisses him good morning. It should have been me, Jim thinks, staring out the back of the cart taking them away from the eerily still scene.

Charlie reaches over and touches him gently on the knee. “Have you seen Jamie?” he says softly.

“I saw him go down,” Jim says, toneless. “He didn't get up.”

“Ah,” Charlie murmurs. He sits back on the hard wooden bench. “I see.”

Jim saw him fall, saw him topple off Topthorn in slow motion, leg bent in a viscerally unnatural way. And he didn't get up, didn't move from where he fell, blood pooling beneath him, no matter how much Jim shouted and shouted. It's something Jim had visualised, thousands of times, over and over lying awake the night before a battle, but it's not something he had ever truly anticipated having to watch. He had always hoped, selfishly, that if either of them had to die that he would, so he wouldn't have to live through Jamie's absence, the constant reminders from where their lives had intertwined that no matter how much Jim grasped in the dark he would always come up empty-handed.

*

It's a long, hard slog.

Jim gets out of the POW camp within a few weeks. He worries for Charlie, left alone and only a boy, but at the same time he can't wait to get away, can't wait to rush back to the front with a new troop of men, men who don't remind him of Jamie at every turn.

When he arrives in England, the doctor examining him frowns and says something about bronchitis and a lingering chest infection, so Jim is forced into going home for a week's leave. His mother coddles him, the housekeeper spoils him, and Jim spends all his time curled up inside his head trying to escape the memories of Jamie that surround him.

They ran down this corridor, chasing each other with icicles and yelling like boys. This is the thorn bush Jamie fell into while trying to learn to cycle and had to be very carefully cut out of by the gardener, who mourned his bush more. There is the fountain him and Jamie used to pretend to be frogs in on warm summer days. Jim is surrounded, enveloped by memories of Jamie and their shared lives, and it is hard, so hard, too hard to adjust to a life that has only Jim and no Jamie in. Without Jamie, he isn't Jim, he's just James, like hundreds of others in England, and without Jamie he does not quite know anything anymore.

*

The night before Jim is scheduled to leave England, he wakes up at what must be three or four in the morning, gasping with the weight of freshly-dreamed dreams, dreams where Jamie is alive and well and smiling, where the charge had succeeded, where everything was as it used to be. He chokes on it, trying his hardest not to cry with it, swallows the want and the loneliness. He punches his pillow viciously, not realising he's crying until he tastes salt in his mouth, and it is then that he gives in, collapses in on himself, cries desperately and with huge racking sobs, because Jamie is gone and he can never come back and Jim will never see him again.

*

It's hard and filthy and fast out on the front line, and Jim throws himself into it, leads every charge and follows every order, losing himself in the gore and mud, the sprays of dirt as grenades are thrown, the screams of dying men searching for something, anything to cling on to.

*

When the war ends, Jim comes back to England a decorated war hero, and yet he does not feel the praise that is heaped upon him, feels only the weight of dead men in the medals on his chest. He is told repeatedly of his bravery, of his cunning, of his skill in saving so many men from near-certain death, and he smiles and nods politely and thanks each person for their kind words, but all the while he is scrambling to get away, run away to someplace Jamie never touched, somewhere his memories cannot suffocate him.

*

In time he grows to love the memories Jamie has left him, cherish the glowing remembrances of days long gone, tend the fading embers of a fading memory. It is with love and joy that Jim tells his grandchildren of his youthful exploits with Jamie, a man they have never seen but who comes alive through Grandpa's stories.

Or that's how Jim likes to imagine things would have gone if Jamie hadn't shown up on his doorstep just as the festering wound that was his heart was beginning to heal.

*


End file.
